This is Mr. Su Perannoyed and I’m having some issues in a relationship of mine. It’s an intimate relationship I’ve developed with exploded views that really allows me to see the assembly for what it is, and more importantly, how it works. But how can I balloon items that are mysteriously outside the drawing view? Just not working here. The drawing view (see screenshot) is much smaller than the actual extent of the exploded view………..

Not the drawing border, but the exploded view itself. My second screenshot showing the border showed up for a bit and now disappeared again… (help Ben?) but what happens is the size of the drawing view is incorrect, and much smaller than the extent of the components you see. Definitely a glitch of some sort.

I had fixed the issue with the post and see you edited it again that is where it got lost how did you edit it? Thru the SolidWorks addin or on a browser? If the browser what browser? I fixed it again DONT TOUCH!

@ivanl
I’ve run into this before. For some reason the drawing view border doesn’t size to the extent of the geometry in the view.
As a result you can’t select anything outside of the drawing view border. A workaround I have used is to sketch a line, starting in the middle of the view and out past the furthest point of the geometry.
This forces the drawing view border to extend to the sketched line, allowing you to select geometry you couldn’t before.

What version of SolidWorks are you on? I haven’t seen this behaviour in quite some time.

@CBL I don’t recall if locking the view focus or using auto-balloon worked or not. I may have not even tried.

I’m using SW09 SP3.0. Locking view focus doesn’t help, but surprisingly auto balloon identifies and balloons the parts outside the drawing view. Of course these are never in the ideal places so when I move a leader then I lose the reference right away. When I try to manually balloon a component outside drawing view it doesn’t highlight an edge at all. If you click on a face or edge it just gives the question mark with no leader. Also if you zoom into that area the parts will disappear.

Chris, great work around. Tried sketching the line from center of view to outside extents of components and bravo! it recognizes edges/part.

No, not working in lightweight. Which brings up another thing that frusterates the heck outta me… I haven’t found a clear answer or reason, but ever since we upgraded to SW2009 it seems that when opening an assembly drawing the components are automatically loaded as lightweight with no option anywhere to load as resolved. Anyone know why? I’m clueless. I prefer not to work lightweight at all and for my purposes never really need to.

This was an “enhancement” put into SW2009.
There was a lot of kick back from the community on the forums and as of SP4 you have the option to turn it off.
When you go to open the drawing you can now uncheck “Lightweight”

I have several assemblies with two configurations. The only difference between the two configurations is that there are a few parts with a different configuration. Is there a way to apply the same exploded view to the second assembly without having to do it manually a second time?

It’s just finicky. Try dragging the exploded view above the config name you want to copy to, that’s how it’s working for me in 09. You need to have the config active that you are copying the exploded view from also.

I’m not sure why it isn’t working for you. I get the circle with diagonal line, then when I drag it somewhere it can copy, it changes to a down and to the left arrow with a small plus sign next to it. Then it copies. If you’re dragging down (in the config tree), it may look like it’s dropping another copy under the active config, but it’s actually dropping a copy under the config below it.